1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to quoting, proposing, and contracting insurance policies for property and casualty coverages. More specifically, the field of the invention is that of a network based quoting and contracting system providing such coverages for ministries and church type organizations.
2. Description of the Related Art
Insurance companies offer insurance policies for covering potential liabilities or damages relating to property and casualty events. Such insurance companies either operate through agents who act on behalf of customers to obtain policies, or interact directly with customers in issuing policies. For companies that market their products through agents, the agents are either dedicated employees or independent agency organizations, and they interact with potential purchasers of the insurance policies. Typically, an insurance agent elicits information from the potential purchaser and sends that quote information to the insurance company for a quote. The quote information is less than the total amount of information needed to underwrite the policy, but includes sufficient information to calculate a commercially reasonable estimate of the final policy cost. The insurance company uses the quote information to calculate the likely cost or range of costs for the policy, and provides that information to agent to convey to the potential purchaser.
Once the potential purchaser decides to continue the insurance application process, the agent then needs to obtain further information to complete an insurance application and submit it to the insurance company. The insurance company applies its policy rate calculations to all the information obtained from the potential customer and prepares a final insurance policy document. This document may include one or more blanks for pieces of information unrelated to the rate calculation but needed to create the insurance contract with the potential purchaser. Only after completing the final insurance policy document and obtaining the necessary signatures does the policy come into effect. For companies that market insurance directly to the customer, information needed to issue the policy is obtained directly from the potential customer. A quote containing the insurance cost is conveyed directly back to the customer without the involvement of any agent or other intermediary.
This process of quoting and completing the insurance policy is well known in the insurance industry, and involves several potentially cumbersome steps of data entry, communication, and calculation. Each of these steps may be subject to interruption or delay, and each may or may not be tailored to specific insurance needs. One general insurance need is that of property and casualty insurance, which protects an organization from random damages and potential legal liability for casualty losses to other parties. In order for an insurance company to properly assess a potential purchaser, many pieces of information relating to the property and potential liabilities of the organization need to be collected and analyzed. Further, for certain types of potential purchasers, the special situations of those potential purchasers need to be accounted for in the quoting and rate calculation process.
One example of a special situation is that of ministries and similar organizations. Typically, churches and other religiously affiliated institutions have physical properties and a wide variety of activities, and thus have many potential areas where the risk of liability is significant. In order to assess those risks, more particular types of information need to be gathered. Additionally, the potential purchasers may have several liability concerns which require very specific insurance coverage. Churches and other religiously affiliated institutions require specialized coverages to efficiently address the ministry-focused nature of these entities. Such coverages include, but are not limited to, the following: membership emotional injury, student emotional injury, clergy ordination/placement, sexual acts, counseling acts, religious communication, religious activity, discriminatory acts, Christian school and college coverages, Christian camp coverages, church transportation, foreign mission operations, as well as other ministry-specific coverages. In addition to these ministry-specific coverages, standard property, liability, automobile, and workers' compensation coverage are also provided.
The conventional process of gathering data and calculating quotes and rates is even more cumbersome for special situations than with a more typical business insurance policy. Further, because much of this data gathering for ministry-related insurance policies requires such non-standard information, conventional processes may not fully support the type of inquiries needed.